OUT OF PRINT

OUT OF PRINT

CHAPTER ONE

Liverpool

December 1985

Frank had lost his son on Bold Street. That was what they said. The Liverpool Echo, his neighbours at number 19, the lads in the dart league and even Trish, his wife. They said it as if Frank had carelessly misplaced 10-year-old Eddie, like a house key or wallet. Eventually he’d be found. Mysteriously appearing back in the same place he’d disappeared from. But Frank was the only other person who knew the truth. Or believed it enough anyway. His son wasn’t lost or misplaced; he was stuck in another time.

But how did Frank know this you might ask? I mean, it’s pretty strange to disappear into another decade, especially on a Liverpool high street. It was, after all, a perfectly ordinary Saturday afternoon, when he disappeared. The sun was shining for a change and a strong wind from the docks buffered the seagulls that shrieked overhead. It was a home match day. Liverpool versus Stoke City. The street was filled with red and white; candy cane scarves running down spines. You couldn’t move for the sight of them. There wasn’t a better day for someone to spot something untoward. And Frank was especially good at spotting things. His mind was like a telephoto lens, which could zoom in on the smallest of misdemeanours on account of him working as a local bobby in Kirkdale for the last three decades.

But Bold Street has a history of upending ordinary days. It can get you real quick, like the sleight of a magician’s hand. Every so often, the strange phenomenon would be reported. The local rag carrying a column, perhaps sandwiched between an advert for Vileda Super Mops and Madam Pellegrino’s tarot night, about a mysterious timeslip that had occurred there. A thief running along a passageway in 1984, only to find himself slap bang in the middle of the blitz. The high-pitched whine of a bomb dropping streets away bursting his ear drums and causing him to run straight into the pathway of the chasing policeman back in 1984. A woman who stopped to admire a red-cheeked baby in a blue bonnet, snug in his gleaming Silver Cross pram outside Woolworths, only to look up and see a man tipping his silk top hat to her from the perch of a horse and carriage. When she looked back the baby was crying and the number 27 bus to Kirkdale had arrived. But Frank didn’t know anything about this, he had to find out much later. After his son had disappeared and couldn’t be found. It began one ordinary Saturday afternoon on Bold Street.